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	<div class="headline"><span class="chapter_number">Chapter 2: </span><span class="chapter_name">Pronunciation</span></div>
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        First things first. To start our journey in Japanese, we've got to know how
        to pronounce it. As it turns out, Japanese pronunciation is very
        straightforward compared to English. As a general rule, one letter is
        pronounced only one way, and as I mentioned before, there aren't very many
        sounds to begin with, so you're probably in for a pleasant surprise.
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<p>Before we look at the vowels, I'd like to say a word about
Romanization. Romanization means writing words from another language in the
alphabet that we use in English, the Roman alphabet. Typically, we tend to
think of our alphabet as the "English alphabet," but the fact of the matter is
that the characters A to Z are used - with a few minor variations - in very
many languages besides English. Our alphabet is actually called the Roman
alphabet, since it goes all the way back to Latin.</p>
<p>It's handy to be able to read and write Japanese using Roman
letters, because that way we can start learning Japanese words without having
to know how to read Japanese characters. It lets us jump right into the study
of the language itself. But Roman letters really don't cut it for any sort of
true study of Japanese. </p>
<p>Japanese has two "alphabets," more accurately called <i>syllabaries</i>. That name stems from the
fact that, unlike English, where one letter represents just a part of a sound
(try to pronounce a <i>k</i> by itself),
every letter in the syllabaries represents an entire sound, or syllable. So
just one letter, all by itself, can be read "ka." </p>
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